But New York being the center of the universe, we see no real need to cover anything that happens outside of the five boroughs. So rather than sending our Foreign Correspondent to far-flung locales to report on media people in said far-flung locales, we’re sending him off to far-flung locales to report on media people in New York.

Without further ado, we’re pleased to introduce FishbowlNY Foreign Correspondent, Sacramento Is The New New York—or “SAC” for short. [Translation: we don’t know his real name.] We’re starting him off slow by having him cover New York bloggers, and when he’s ready to deal with the maelstrom of discontent and ego confusion that is New York old media, we’ll have him take a crack at the Barry Dillers and Mort Zuckermans.

SAC’s initial investigations seemed to indicate that the New York bloggers are merely badly scripted computer programs (“bots,” he said) that generate random textual outputs and, occasionally, photos of cats. We pointed out that were this true, it would mean that he was now in the employ of a piece of software—and badly scripted software, at that—but he had his fingers in his ears and was loudly singing a song with the somewhat odd refrain, “I can’t heeeeear yoooou…”

This phenomenon is not without precedent, as proto-bot Andrew Sullivanattempted the same algorithim sometime last year, with mixed results. I say mixed because then it will sound like I have some thoughful insight into Sullivan when in fact, I haven’t ever read a single word he’s written. I’m not kidding. But I hear that that he can benchpress, like, 500 pounds or something, so don’t tell him I said anything. I don’t want him to lift almost 3 of me into the air. At least, not without a spotter.

This move has caused a shockwave throughout NYC. People are scrambling to make sense of this, each person dealing with it in their own, unique way. Some have jumped on the Kottke bandwagon and shown their supportmonetarily, while others have quietly given up blogging althogether. The reaction here in Sacramento can be summed up in the following interaction I had with the bakery girl at Safeway this morning:

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